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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.
Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.
I saw a note on Substack claiming that Shiloh Hendrix was suffering from postpartum depression at the time of the altercation which landed her in hot water. I have no idea if this is true or not, but assuming it is, I imagine there's extremely minimal overlap between the people offering public (and, in some cases, financial) support for Clancy, and the people who think Hendrix should not have faced criminal charges for saying the gamer word.
An even more potent hypothetical, I think, is the observation that none of the women supporting Clancy would have done so if, in the throes of postpartum psychosis, she'd killed three dogs rather than three human children.
The slippery slope, my moral betters would have me believe, is a fallacy: legalising X does not inevitably lead to Y, which is like X but more extreme.
It's all well and good to think that we can draw a bright line in the sand and say that killing a fetus (up to and including a full-term viable fetus) is fine and dandy, but killing a baby outside the womb is not. I know that some high-decouplers can separate these into two completely distinct mental categories. But most people (as I'm sure you're aware, or you wouldn't be reading this) are not high-decouplers. Increased support for contraception inevitably leads to increased support for the morning-after pill inevitably leads to increased support for first-trimester abortion inevitably leads to increased support for full-term abortion – and, as the Clancy supporters demonstrate, for post-term abortion.
The Hendrix comparison is illustrative. One of the strongest surviving taboos in the Anglosphere is that white people should not say the gamer word. No excuses: not if they're singing along with a song by a black musician, not if they're a politician quoting something a black person said, not if they're an academic discussing a piece of classical music by a black composer whose title features that word, not even if they're a professor of linguistics using a word from a completely different language which sounds a bit like the gamer word. Woke people obviously feel that relaxing this taboo even a smidge would lead to an opening of the floodgates (almost like it's a... slope that is... slippery, or something). It follows that we cannot extend grace to any person who uses it, no matter how sympathetic they might be: not even a woman who may have been suffering from postpartum depression and who got into a public altercation with a nonce. This taboo is so rigidly enforced that not even the "be kind" brigade wants to extend any forbearance or forgiveness to Hendrix.
But compare with abortion. It started off with the morning-after pill, then first-trimester abortion, and before you know it, low-decouplers are correctly intuiting that, if a mother killing a fetus at nine months shouldn't be a hanging crime, why should killing a child at five years be? On what grounds can we possibly justify throwing someone in jail for doing the latter, but doing nothing to someone who does the former (perhaps even subsidising their decision at the taxpayer's expense)?
Louise Perry's "We Are Repaganising" continues to trouble me deeply.
English common law allowed abortion before 'quickening' (16-20 weeks, when the fetus's movements can be felt) for centuries, following Church teaching that the fetus was not yet ensouled. So the debate has not been monotonic.
England, like several other commonwealth and European countries, has infanticide law defining a lesser charge for 'mentally disturbed' women who killed their <1 year old babies. This arose because juries were reluctant to hand out the death penalty to poor and desperate unmarried women.
https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/100-years-of-the-infanticide-act
This strikes many Americans as a grave injustice, but it doesn't seem to increase infanticide rates.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2174580/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.70136
Citation Needed on English common law allowing abortion for centuries (instead of just classifying it as something wrong but not yet murder), but I know that the stance of the Catholic Church is often misrepresented in these online fact checks.
As for England, a cursory search turns up:
Before then, women were punished through religious penance for procuring an abortion. The Laws of Henry I prescribed three years of religious penance for procuring an abortion before quickening.
But that's a religious penance and not a punishment from the government? We have to consider that before industrialization, the tools available to the government were execution, corporeal punishment, and imprisonment in the case of someone wealthy enough to be worth it. It has been very unpopular to execute or beat women publicly, and proving an early abortion wasn't a miscarriage in a court of law would have been difficult. A religious confession to the crime, followed by a period of required penance, was the best means to punish something that was at the least highly frowned upon at the time.
We have enough evidence to show that abortion before quickening was not considered an unalloyed good like it is today.
Also I'd be shocked if I were to grab a pre-quickening advocate from that period, drag them into the twenty-first century and then explain that starvation is essentially a thing of the past and contraception is available but society still would like to make what would be essentially 'abortions of convenience' compared to the prevailing historical situation.
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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC487792/
https://studentbriefs.law.gwu.edu/crcl/2024/06/24/dobbs-v-history-part-one-english-common-law/
https://lawandhistoryreview.org/article/abortion-was-a-crime-three-medievalists-respond-to-english-cases-dating-all-the-way-back-to-the-13th-century-corroborate-the-treatises-statements-that-abortio/
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